Thursday, 13 June 2013

Den Svarta Boken / The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk (2.5/5)

GoodReads says:Galip is a
lawyer living in Istanbul. His wife, the detective novel–loving Ruya, has
disappeared. Could she have left him for her ex-husband orCelâl, a popular newspaper
columnist? But Celâl, too, seems to have vanished. As Galip investigates, he
finds himself assuming the enviable Celâl's identity, wearing his clothes,
answering his phone calls, even writing his columns. Galip pursues every conceivable
clue, but the nature of the mystery keeps changing, and when he receives a
death threat, he begins to fear the worst.

I say: I read this in
Swedish for uni, so any comments about the language may be specific for that
translation. And I have many comments about the language and the prose.

Quite frankly, this bored me all the way through.

I don’t
particularly like detective stories and having to suffer through something I otherwise
would have tossed to the side due to uni made me resent this.

A lot.

The composition in
flawless, I have to give Pamuk that. And the plot itself is interesting. What I
took issue with was that I couldn’t get into the prose. The narrator, Galip,
was so full of contradiction and neurosis, and was just so annoying that I didn’t
want to follow him on his search for his wife. And then we have newspaper
articles written by his uncle Celâl strewn in every
other chapter that I found to be dull and conceited. Yes, this was the way Celâl wrote, but I hated it.

There were a few passages about Istanbul’s
history that I thought were fascinating, and they are the only redeeming parts
of the novel. Because even though we spent a lot of time discussing the novel
and what it meant – and I feel like I need to stress that it is a very well-written piece of
literature that is apparently already a modern classic in Turkey - I can’t get
over how much I struggled to get through it.

So, despite the fact that I usually
hammer on about how I prefer a well-written book with less plot over a poorly
written book with a great plot, The Black Book throws that notion out the
window. But then again, just because I novel I well-written doesn’t necessarily
mean that it’s written in a style that I enjoy. So yeah, not my type of
literature and therefore I was never destined to like it, and I think 2.5/5
gives a good enough idea of how I feel about it.